Cheia de axé (full of axé): spirituality, resistance, and repair in Pernambuco's Afro‐Brazilian traditional communities

Abstract

This article explores how Afro-Brazilian communi-ties in Pernambuco respond to state-led industrialdevelopment through culturally rooted practices ofresistance and repair. Drawing on archival and ethno-graphic research in the coastal municipalities of Cabode Santo Agostinho and Ipojuca, this study traces theeffects of Brazil’s large-scale economic developmentprogram, known as the Growth Acceleration Program(PAC, in Portuguese), which enabled the expansionof the Suape Port Industrial Complex (CIPS). Builton former plantation lands, CIPS has displaced over26,000 residents and disrupted traditional livelihoodstied to mangroves, subsistence farming, and small-scale fishing. Yet rather than portraying Afro-Braziliancommunities as passive victims of racial capitalism’sextractive logics, the article foregrounds their strate-gies for sustaining life: syncretic spiritual practices,ancestral reverence, ecological care, and popularmusic. These embodied and relational practices arenot only sources of individual resilience but also toolsfor collective healing and political engagement. Byanalyzing how residents cultivate joy, autonomy, andconnection in the midst of systemic violence, thearticle contributes to broader anthropological debateson repair, development, and plantation afterlives. Itcalls for expanding coloniality frameworks to accountfor how racialized communities generate alternative futures through cultural creativity, environmental intimacy, and everyday acts of refusal.